King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, “Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava.”

Sometimes musicians who like to jam a lot get called self-indulgent. After all, long improvisational pieces are often more fun to make than to listen to, and there’s a self-pleasing element to jettisoning song structure and just wailing away on a guitar. But with six full-time members, Australia’s King Gizzard & The Wizard Lizard is a musical pod, like whales or dolphins.

As such, the musical migrations of the band feel less like the virtuosic pyrotechnics of a single player getting his rocks off, and more like a strange amalgamated life-form creating something wholly new in the primordial musical stew.

King Gizzard and company’s latest album, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, the first of three albums due out in October from the sextet, is a musical ecosystem, with seven separate biomes, extended jams that sprout and mutate like the wildlife around Chernobyl.

For this album, the band’s third of 2022, the guys gave themselves only one restriction as they rolled tape on their improvised recording sessions: Each jam would feature one of the seven modes of the major scale: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian. The first letter of each word in the title forms a mnemonic for the modes. The sessions were then edited down and overdubbed with flute, organ, percussion and additional guitars.

The resulting album is a magic carpet ride through a series of kaleidoscopic musical landscapes. The opener, “Mycelium” is a musical tribute to fungi with Ween-like schmaltz. But somewhere in the song’s third minute, the music blooms. The intricate melody lines of flute and guitar weave around one another, creating something organic, delicate and greater than the sum of their parts. “Ice V” feels a bit like Santana’s “Oye Como Va” on mushrooms as guitars and organ battle inside a musical lava lamp of swirling sonic slabs.

The band mixes disparate musical elements into a frothy stew, combining the textured droning grooves of German Krautrock outfit CAN with the proggy noodling of ’70s bands like Yes and Magma. The album’s longest jam, the 13-minutes-plus “Hell’s Itch” begins with Beatles-esque guitar and flute before settling into a kind of yacht rock groove. Part Christopher Cross, part Jim O’Rourke, singer-guitarist Stu Mackenzie sings stuff like, “Subcutaneous fat feels good like that” as a tubby bass line and a mountain of percussion evoke both dynamic movement and wide open space.

Clocking in at just over nine minutes,”Iron Lung” begins with jazzy piano before combining wah guitar with heavy bass riffs to conjure up ’70s cop show theme coolness. Eventually the song becomes a swirling, psychedelic rave-up. Picture those extended ’60s jams backed by a swirling “liquid light show” composed of vegetable oil, food coloring and an overhead projector.

To say this album is unfocused would be to miss the point. These aren’t three-minute pop songs. Instead, there’s an organic quality to the whole thing, like watching with a time-lapse camera as mold forms in a petri dish. You can hear the band’s friendships in the musical interplay. Even better, these guys clearly push each other to try all kinds of new stuff, so if you don’t like this record, try the other two coming later this month.

Follow writer David Gill at Twitter.com/saxum_paternus.